Documentation to Keep for a Short-Term Rental Tax Position

The four things that carry the position

• Your hours log — dated, described, per property, per person, kept as the work happened.
• Other participants’ hours — cleaners, co-hosts, managers — with the basis you used to arrive at them.
• Booking history — the evidence for the seven-day average-stay calculation.
• Corroboration — receipts, invoices, guest messages, photos, and mileage that back up individual entries.

What good corroboration looks like

You do not need proof for every entry. You need enough that the log is demonstrably anchored to reality. A hardware-store receipt dated the same day as a logged repair does a lot of work. So does a guest message thread matching a logged communication entry, or a photo of a completed job with its original timestamp intact.

Keep the originals rather than screenshots where you can, and keep them attached to — or at least referenced from — the entry they support. Evidence you cannot connect to a specific hour is much weaker than evidence you can.

Organise it per property and per year

Both tests operate per activity and per tax year, so records that are one undifferentiated pile are hard to use. A folder per property per year — log export, booking export, participant summary, receipts — is the structure a CPA can actually work from, and the one you will thank yourself for.

How long to keep it

Longer than you think. The normal assessment window is three years from filing, but it extends in various circumstances, and positions involving losses carried between years can put much older records back in play. Ask your CPA what retention period fits your situation, and default to keeping more.

Digital records with intact dates are far easier to preserve than paper, and far easier to produce in a usable form later.

Make the export the easy part

STR Tracker exports a dated report per property and per period, including other participants and attached evidence, so producing the documentation is a two-minute job rather than a weekend of assembling spreadsheets.